DAC Vision from Cadence’s Lip-Bu Tan

Each of the keynotes at DAC this year was preceded by a vision talk from one of the top EDA executives. I presented the first of those vision talks last week from Wally Rhines and you can find there here. The keynote that followed Wally’s talk, given by Gregg Lowe of Freescale can be found on the EDA Designline here.

The second vision talk came from Lip-Bu Tan, who somewhat reluctantly became the president and Chief Executive Officer of Cadence in 2009 when Michael Fister and four other senior executives suddenly left the company and a failed attempt to buy Mentor Graphics. He had been on the board of Cadence since 2004 and now he sees Cadence as an investment vehicle to go along with the $2B in capital he manages as the founder of Walden International. Walden concentrates on the fabless semiconductor domain.

Lip-Bu started by saying that he is very excited to be in the electronics industry. He said that this is created by having two major platforms happening at the same. The first of these is the smart phone that is around 1.5B units, compared to the mobile phone that was 500M units. The second is tablets. The iPad is growing three times faster than iPhone. But there is a third cycle is coming up. To understand this new wave you have to understand my passion for GoPro, a camera that you wear that can capture HD video and share with friends through WiFi. We are seeing other examples such as Google glass, wearable computing that can monitor your health. These types of devices will be driving towards 50B units by 2020. There are multiple aspects to these devices and I would like to describe one of those to you – that is scanable. For example when you go shopping and you can find out information, or do a check with a friend or wife to see if this is healthy for me to eat, should I buy it. In China already, there are already 400M people using this type of capability. There will be a lot of applications associated with this.

Most VCs are addressing the trend of mobile Internet and social media and these are now being concerned more with the writeable aspect. Consider photos. 500M uploads per day and it is growing. 100 hours per minute of video is uploaded to YouTube and growing. These will drive tremendous global traffic. Today mobile traffic is about 10% and will grow to 15% this year.

This will create tremendous challenges for us to innovate and to meet this opportunity in mobility, crowd, big data and these new smart connected devices that we are talking about. This will require hardware / software co-design and co-verification, we need scalable quality in IP and this is a really big change for the industry, time to market pressure and how all of this will integrate in a timely fashion, advanced geometries with FinFET, 3D IC – all of this makes it very exciting for me.

Customers expect EDA vendors to provide the highest quality, scalable tools and IP that take into account things such as packaging and signal and power integrity. To show how excited I am, I have doubled and triple downed my investment in semiconductors and I told my partners that they can focus on mobile, internet and social media and I am going to concentrate on the semiconductor industry. I have convinced my two sons that there is a future in this industry. There is currently 122,000 openings for EE/CS graduates and only 51,000 graduates. 2.4X more demand than we can supply. He addressed the young people in the audience and said there is a lot of innovation needed and we need you to do that.

At Cadence, during the past four years, we now have a culture for innovation and we are inspired to work with customers on their most complex issue. Customers have told him that if they stop innovating then they will be dead.